Major Force In Civil Rights Movement Will Be Missed BALTIMORE, MD (wypr) - When he came to Maryland in the 1950s, he brought his crew cut, his crutches and his commitment to the social gospel. He found a city in which black and white, rich and poor were sealed away from each other by custom and blind adherence to racial separation. The cit y was divided against it self. Divisions deprived one side of opportunity and the other side of a rich culture it hardly understood. He set about exposing the unfounded fears. It was his duty and his mission as a man of God.

He didn't look like someone who might mount the barricades. He'd had polio as a young man, but it hardly slowed him at all. Perhaps it moved him to greater effort. He had spent months in hospitals. His ward mates were often poor. He saw life from the other side.

With a smile, the twinkly-eyed minister ran full tilt into the walls between campus and community. Class after class of students at Hopkins walked past the ivy covered walls, inviting them to come in. He and his ever-changing team started a tutoring program for city kids. He caught the enthusiasm of university students at a time when there was a hunger among young people to be of service, to show elders they had needless fears of racial conflict if black and white met in theaters or jazz clubs or you name it. He had to sign document s relieving the University of responsibility for any damage or injury that might result.

The young men and women he met stayed in touch with their mentor long after they left the Homewood campus. He took them on missions to Central American countries and occasionally married them. At a time when people over 30 were automatically under suspicion, Wickwire won life-long friends among young people.

His commitment to fairness and social justice won friends also outside the university. At one point he served as president of the black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance.

When he arrived in Baltimore, he saw what he regarded as the perfect environment for taking on an all-too-pervasive system of discrimination, poverty and neglect. He engineered change by giving his life to the struggle. Chester Wickwire - Whet the Jet -- died Sunday at the age of 94, keeping the faith until the end.
You've been listening to an essay by WYPR's Senior News Analyst Fraser Smith. Your comment s are welcome at fsmith@wypr.org. © Copyright 2009, wypr